REVIEW: Dance Flick

This movie was dreadful. "I almost walked out" levels of bad.

Look, I love a good dance movie, but they do really all have the same plot -- upper-middle-class white girl wants to dance but can't for some reason, meets non-white/poor (or both) boy who teaches her how to express herself through dancing different from anything she's ever learned, she accomplishes something she never thought she could using these new skills, and then leaves. Boy will not appear in the sequel in any way.

This is a set-up ripe for lampooning, and given that DF was made by the same people who did "Scary Movie," which was apparently a treat for horror fans, I had high hopes of them bringing the funny.

If the writers had watched any dance movie other than "Save the Last Dance," they'd have had better luck. The movie was entirely a remake of STLD, with bits of other things thrown in (almost all of which were much funnier than the main plot-line/satire). Pieces of it were *very* funny, but there wasn't really a whole lot of dancing (although what little existed was fun to watch). Unfortunately, a great deal of the humor is in race jokes, some of which are funny (mostly because they ring of truth) but a large number of which just made me uncomfortable, and all of which became boring after they'd been beaten into the ground, resurrected, re-flogged to death, and then presented as warmed-over leftovers five minutes later.

I'm having a hard time unpacking the bits that made me unhappy because they weren't funny, because they were racial humor (and I have privilege I need to examine there), because they weren't true to the style of the movies they were parodying, or just because they presented the kids in the movie as shiftless, futureless losers who chase "respect" at the cost of anything that might make their lives better. (Which is so not the message of any of the original movies, and isn't really even suggested by them, as far as I can tell, so it's not even like it's a funny reversal of a "dance can get you anywhere, stay in school, don't do drugs" message.)

So yeah... Not enough dancing, too much uncomfortable and overblown humor. Save your money and go see Star Trek instead.

Edited to add later: I see I left out my rant about the terrible ten minute "your mom is dead and it's all your fault" "ballet" sequence. That's probably just as well. It was every bit as bad as you think it was.